When the Devil's Idle

by Leta Serafim

  Patronas wished with all his heart that just once Papa Michalis would long for something besides the most expensive food in Greece, red or otherwise—a pizza, maybe, or bottled water.

  The order had depleted nearly all his cash reserves. The fried crawfish the priest also had a longing for, which rang up at eighteen euros, used up the rest. He’d have to find an ATM tomorrow.

  Papa Michalis filleted a fish and took a bite. “You spent time with Maria Georgiou. What’s your impression of her?”

  “Steady. Not easily taken by surprise.”

  “Did she volunteer that she was from Aghios Stefanos? It seems unlikely that she would have been so forthcoming with that information if her purpose was indeed revenge. It would have made more sense for her to have disguised her origins.”

  A fair point, Patronas conceded, recalling the interview. Maria Georgiou had been absolutely straightforward with him, made no effort to disguise her background or family history. If she was indeed the killer, wouldn’t she have pointed him in another direction? Instead, what she’d said had led him straight back to her. Without a moment’s hesitation, she’d given him the classic three: means, motive, and opportunity.

  Shit. He could feel his theory collapsing. Guilty people didn’t behave that way. No, they lied and dissembled.

  Papa Michalis was wasting no time, Patronas saw, forking up the smaller fish two at a time. “Don’t feel bad, Yiannis. I know you were sure you had her—that she was the one—but I thought from the beginning it was highly unlikely a woman committed this crime. Female murderers are few and far between. That’s why we remember them. Lucretia Borgia, the Roman empress, and Livia, who poisoned all who stood between her son, Tiberius, and the throne. A few more maybe, but not many. Cleopatra is far more typical, taking her own life rather than killing another. Also, like Cleopatra, women prefer poison. It’s their weapon of choice. They also lack the musculature to beat a man to death.”

  Patronas snorted. Musculature? Where the hell did he get this stuff?

  He moved to grab a fish. “So all the talk of revenge, that little speech you gave me earlier, you didn’t mean it?”

  “I have since reconsidered. As I said, I think it’s highly unlikely. Being a woman, Yiannis, it trumps everything.”

  As if he knew.

  After dinner Patronas returned to the hotel and told Antigone Balis that he and the others would be leaving for a few days, but would need the room back when they returned.

  She was all business, chilly. “I’ll have to charge you for the time you’re away,” she said, paging through her book. “When you registered, you said a week.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Then she seemed to regret her coldness and went into the kitchen and packed him a parcel of food to take with him.

  A promising sign, he told himself, packing him a meal. A woman doesn’t make it her business to feed a man she doesn’t like. First, she tends to one kind of hunger, food in this instance, and then she unzips her dress and addresses another.

  Maybe all was not lost and he’d be clutching something besides a buoy or himself one of these nights.

  He peered inside the bag. Praise the Lord, if there wasn’t a little tub of keftedakia—meatballs—inside. They were fresh, judging by the smell. The bag also contained a dozen fresh figs and half a karidopita, walnut cake, wrapped up in foil. She’d even put in forks and napkins.

  He looked around for Papa Michalis, and not seeing him, furtively ate one of the meatballs. They were delicious, delicately seasoned with onion and mint. So, in addition to possessing the torso of a goddess, the woman could cook. His cup runneth over, sort of like the contents of her brassiere.

  ‘Not for your teeth,’ his mother had said, but maybe Antigone Balis was. Maybe this time his luck would change and a beautiful woman would find her way into his bed. It had never happened to him before. Statistically, he was due. Thoughtfully, he ate another meatball.

  Antigone Balis and him. Sure, why not?

  But then she told him she’d charge him forty-five euros for the food—fifteen euros apiece—and add it to the bill.

  He wasn’t Romeo calling out to her Juliet. No, he was just a customer, a customer being ripped off. He felt like weeping, but he controlled himself, bade her kalinyhta, good night, and made a dignified exit.

  Tembelos returned to the hotel late that night, so tired he could barely stand.

  “How’s the merry widow?” he asked, flopping down on a chair and taking his shoes off.

  “Greedy,” Patronas answered, still upset about the forty-five euros.

  “Greedy is good. She wants you, Yiannis. I saw it in her eyes. So how are you going to go about it? You going to tackle her? Pull her down and have at it?”

  “I think that’s called ‘rape,’ Giorgos, and I’d get arrested.” He wasn’t in the mood for jokes, wished his friend would stop.

  “Perhaps a dinner invitation?”

  “With you and Evangelos hanging around? Not to mention a priest?” He nodded to where Papa Michalis was sleeping. “The presence of a priest is hardly conducive to romance.”

  “I could keep him away.”

  “No, you couldn’t. I ate dinner with him last night. He’s like a lion pouncing on a gazelle, Papa Michalis. He can smell a free meal from far away, track it for days across the savannahs of Africa and tear into it with his teeth.” Patronas made a gnashing sound.

  “No need to tell me. He’s a shrewd one, our priest. All pious and full of cant—Lay not up the treasures of this earth—except when it comes to meals someone else is paying for. Then he’s a fucking camel.”

  Patronas laughed. “A vacuum cleaner.”

  “A human Hoover.”

  “A whale. One of the big ones that eat plankton.” He proceeded to suck the air, his head going from side to side, then attached his mouth to the fabric of his friend’s shirt and pretended to inhale it.

  It worked, the joking. Patronas was grateful. It eased his disappointment over Antigone Balis, about him not being Romeo. Maybe he should choose another role model. After all, Romeo had committed suicide. Things hadn’t worked out so well for him.

  Chapter Eleven

  Faithful earth, unfaithful sea.

  —Greek Proverb

  After breakfast, Patronas, Tembelos, and Papa Michalis walked to the police station together. Up two flights of stairs with no elevator, it was hidden away at the top of a tower and not easily accessible to the public.

  There was an icon of Jesus in an arched alcove outside the station, a big one, nearly two meters high. In Patronas’ mind the placement was inappropriate—police and Jesus, they didn’t exactly go together—but Evangelos said such was the nature of Patmos. “The so-called ‘holy island,’ ” he said. “Every third person is a priest. Criminals are rare here.”

  A row of potted plants and a filthy grill from some long ago Easter celebration took up the rest of the space.

  In no hurry to go to work, Patronas lingered outside for a few minutes, smoking a cigarette and looking out over Skala.

  The office of the Hellenic Coast Guard occupied the ground floor of the same building, and he could see men and women in blue uniforms walking briskly in and out, monitoring the traffic at the harbor with walkie-talkies. On a small hillside to his right was the seventeenth-century chapel of Aghia Paraskevi, said to possess a miraculous icon that restored sight. Another church, far older, stood almost directly below, virtually at his feet, its two domes glimmering dully in the sun.

  He had tried to buy a Greek newspaper at a kiosk earlier but hadn’t been able to find one. There’d been plenty of German ones, stacks of Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but no Ekathimerini or To Bhma. Apparently, Patmos wasn’t Greek anymore; it had become an outpost of Berlin.

  With a sigh, Patronas ground out his cigarette, pushed open the door and entered the station. Tembelos was already on the computer, typing feverishly on the keyboard. Papa Michalis was sitting next to him, doin
g a much slower version of the same.

  Wearing headphones, Evangelos was listening to Bechtel’s MP3 player, stopping and restarting it as he jotted down notes from the interviews with the family.

  “You find anything?” he asked them.

  “Maybe,” Tembelos said.

  He pointed to the computer screen. “I’ve been researching the Twelfth Company, the unit that butchered the people in the village of Aghios Stefanos, and I put in a request for pictures. One thing about Nazis: they kept good records, photographed what they did and who they did it to. There’s a shot of a bunch of them riding donkeys in front of the Acropolis. About sums them up, if you ask me. Asses on top of asses; asses—if I may be so bold—squared. They even took photos of Kalavryta after they killed everybody.”

  He gestured at the screen. “A man named Böchner—two of those dots Germans use over the ‘o’—was in charge. That’s him there, see? Seems he was some kind of maniac. His own men called him ‘Attila.’ ”

  Patronas examined the picture. “No scars.”

  “No nothing. Partisans killed him in 1944.”

  “You find anyone who looks like the dead man?”

  “Not yet, but if it’s out there, I will find it. I’ve got people looking all over the world.”

  Patronas nodded. If Tembelos could place Walter Bechtel anywhere near Maria Georgiou’s village, they might have a case.

  He didn’t hold out much hope. Unless she confessed to the crime, most probably all they would be able to establish was that she and her family were victims of a group of rogue foreign soldiers a long time ago. The police and the prosecutor would have nothing to go on but that … and even that was uncertain. She could deny she’d even been in Aghios Stefanos on the day in question, testify that she’d been living with relatives somewhere else. If what the priest said was true, the casualties had been many—nearly the whole village shot to death. There might be no one left alive to contradict her.

  It was around four o’clock when the fax with the photograph came in. Tembelos retrieved it from the machine. Reaching for his magnifying glass, he studied the paper closely before handing it on to Patronas. “I’m pretty sure that’s him. Take a look and see what you think.”

  Smudged and out of focus, the photograph showed a group of soldiers, rifles in hand, standing in front of a burning building. Judging by the uniforms, the distinct shape of the helmets, the soldiers were German.

  “See those columns there, the frieze?” Tembelos pointed out details of the building. “That’s the town hall of Aghios Stefanos. I recognize it.”

  Taking their time, the four of them took turns examining the fax, passing the magnifying glass back and forth over the image.

  “It’s him,” Tembelos said with growing certainty. “See those scars on his face? That’s Walter Bechtel. I’d stake my life on it.”

  Patronas hesitated. “You sure this is her village? Not Kalavryta or Distomo—one of those other places they annihilated?”

  “Yup. It’s Aghios Stefanos. The commission in Athens faxed it to me just now, the one seeking reparations for the massacres in Epirus during the war.”

  Taking the fax from Tembelos, Patronas looked at it again. There was no date or location on it, no identifying mark or list of names. Just a group of nameless jackals posing for a photograph.

  “It’s not enough,” he said, handing the picture back. “So what if he was there? It doesn’t prove he killed her father or that the two of them knew each another. She was a child. All the men that day would have looked the same to her—uniforms, guns.”

  Evangelos concurred. “There were soldiers in my village during the war, and I never heard anyone describe them physically or call them by name. Rank maybe, but not by name. They knew who the Gestapo agents were and did their best to avoid them, my grandmother said, but that was it.”

  “You researched the massacre,” Patronas said, turning back to Tembelos. “How long did it last? How long did the soldiers stay in that village?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is it started early and they shot up everything. They might have been living there for all we know. There were German units stationed all over Epirus for the duration of the war, fighting the resistance. Two or three years in some places. If they were in Aghios Stefanos that long, she definitely would have known him.”

  He tapped the fax. “This photo gives us what we need, Yiannis. You’ll see. It’s going to unlock the case.”

  “What about the family? Do we show it to them? Get them to verify his identity?”

  Tembelos considered the idea for a moment. “Not until we’re sure, Yiannis. From what you said, Gunther Bechtel’s pretty touchy on the subject. He might charge you with harassment if you imply his father was a war criminal.”

  “A Nazi on Patmos,” Evangelos said in amazement. “Who would have thought? Sunning himself on our beaches, a man like that.”

  Patronas scanned the photo and emailed it to his boss in Athens.

  After he saw it, Stathis reluctantly authorized a trip to Epirus. The four of them were to take a boat to Piraeus that night—economy class, he was careful to specify—then take an unmarked car and drive to Maria Georgiou’s village and question the inhabitants there. While they were in Epirus, they were not to discuss the murder of Walter Bechtel, but instead to gather as much information as they could on the Nazi atrocities in the region and work to determine the identities of the men who had committed them.

  “Anyone asks, you’re there on a pending reparations case.”

  “Didn’t the German president say they were done with reparations—that they had a ‘moral debt’ and that was it?”

  “People who lived through that time will be glad to talk to you, Patronas, no matter who you represent. They don’t want these events forgotten. But be careful, this is strictly a fact-finding mission. We don’t have solid evidence that the victim was involved in the massacre and we don’t want to damage his reputation needlessly. For all we know, he might have spent the war working in the army canteen serving up stewed fruit or whatever slop those people ate.”

  A short man with a melodic voice and the build of a rooster, Stathis had risen swiftly through the ranks and was now in charge of both the northern and southern Aegean regions. Fiercely ambitious, he was quick to push his subordinates aside and take credit for their work and to punish those who displeased him. Patronas had suffered under Stathis’ rule, even been fired and brought back once in the past. He despised him. A person would have to be a snake charmer to get along with his boss. Man was a cobra.

  Taking no chances, Patronas carefully repeated Stathis’ instructions back to him on the phone. “Tread lightly, you’re saying.”

  “Yes, and leave no evidence of your stay. Sleep in another village if you have to and pay cash for everything. No paper trail. No photographs of you and Tembelos grinning at each other in front of some statue.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “If the Bechtel family or anyone connected with the German embassy gets wind of this, I will personally strip you of your rank and court-martial you.”

  “We’re the police, sir, not a military unit. I’m not sure you have the authority to court-martial people.”

  As usual, his boss had little use for his insubordination.

  “Tha se evnouchiso.” In that case, I’ll castrate you. Stathis paused before continuing, “I am authorizing an expenditure of ten euros a day per person plus an allotment for gas. Times are tough, Patronas. You’re not going to be in Epirus long. You and your men can sleep in the car.”

  Before they left Patmos, Patronas phoned Maria Georgiou and told her she was to notify the department if she left the island for any reason. “We need to know your whereabouts at all times,” he said.

  She willingly acquiesced. “I will be here,” she said, “With the Bechtels at their house or in my room in Skala.”

  “Do you have a cellphone?”

  “No, but the man at the desk where I live can a
lways find me. He has my contact information.”

  “Good.”

  The local police were going to monitor her movements while Patronas and the other three were away in Epirus, keep track of where she went and who she spoke to, in case someone else had been involved.

  “I don’t want her to know she’s the object of your surveillance,” Patronas had told them. “Tell her you’re guarding the house to prevent further incidents. You’re there to protect the Bechtels.”

  After Stathis approved the trip, Patronas and the others hurriedly returned to the hotel and packed their bags, intending to take the Blue Star Ferry at midnight. There being no money for cabins, they planned to sleep out on the deck.

  “I’m no good on boats,” Evangelos told Patronas while they were standing in line to buy tickets.

  “What’s the problem? Can’t you swim?”

  “Not very well.”

  Patronas tried to imagine resuscitating Evangelos as they boarded the boat, performing CPR if by some quirk of fate the man was swept overboard.

  Wouldn’t happen, he quickly decided. No matter what, he’d never put his mouth on his. He’d let him drown first.

  His colleague continued to enumerate his fears. What if the boat capsized like that cruise ship in Italy, the Costa Concordia? Or the crew left the door open and water came flooding in like the ferry in the Baltic Sea? To hear him talk, anything connected with the sea undid him, caused panic attacks and palpitations.

  Tuning him out, Patronas stretched out on a bench and tucked his bag under his head. It was a warm night. With any luck, he’d be able to sleep all the way to Athens. Tembelos and the priest quickly followed suit, each on a separate bench. Evangelos alone remained upright, watching the water of the harbor as if it was going to eat him.

  Within minutes, the ferry got underway, gliding swiftly out of the harbor. It was a stormy night and the wind was fierce, the sea covered with whitecaps. With a groan, the boat began to mount the oncoming waves, teetering on the crest for a moment then crashing back down. To Patronas, it felt like a watery kind of earthquake—seven, maybe eight on the Richter Scale. The tourists quickly fled to the lounge below, and within minutes, the four of them had the deck to themselves.